Is that a 1TB flash drive in your pants or are you just happy to see me?

Here at CES, many manufacturers give out flash drives like they're candy. Usually, they're filled with press kits and images, and range from 2GB to 16GB or so in size. For regular consumers, many of us have at least a couple of thumb drives laying around. 32GB and 64GB USB 3.0 flash drives are pretty commonplace these days and can easily be had for less than $1/GB.

However, Kingston today is going totally bonkers with a new 1TB flash drive that is in its DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 product family. Yes, you heard that right -- one terabyte! The DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 is already shipping in a 512GB configuration, and the 1TB model will be available to purchase later this quarter.

The USB 3.0 drive will offer read speeds of 240MB/sec and write speeds of 160MB/sec. It's not as fast as the SSDs that ship in many of today's laptop and desktops, but it's definitely plenty fast for a storage device that fits in your pocket.

Unfortunately, pricing is not available at this time, but it likely won’t come cheap.

A 1TB flash drive is definitely a niche product, but we're quite sure that there will be more than a few people that will scramble to pickup such a device. And who knows, perhaps companies will be giving out 1TB flash drives at CES 2018...

LMFAO. That's ridiculous. I mean obviously this is going to be expensive, but at that price it's entirely impractical. Since almost no single file is larger than 128GB, you could just get a few of those for $75/each.

just for the record, and i qualify this with under no circumstances would i ever shell out more than $100 for a flash drive, your 128MB max file size isn't quite accurate. anyone who works in professional photography, 3D animation, uncompressed audio, video, or the entire building industry etc. commonly have files larger than that. my photoshop files are often 250 megs for a 21 MP image with a few layers and my REVIT files get up to 600mb for the just main central file alone. and don't forget, many have ripped movies that are 700mb a file or more. all of these benefit from being easily mobile - in fact, they're the only files that benefit from being mobile because most files smaller fit easily in the cloud and thus no flash drive is needed at all.

so my point is, there is very much a market for such mobile storage, just not at that price.

quote: i qualify this with under no circumstances would i ever shell out more than $100 for a flash drive,

I remember one of my teachers saying "They have given me 30 megabytes of space on the file server! What am I going to do with 30 megabytes? I will never use that in my whole life!"As I see these flash drives, you would be able to take your own OS and files with you (encrypted, of course!) on one, so you plug your flash drive into a computer, turn it on, and your favourite OS (e.g. Linux Mint, Windows 7, etc) appears with your desktop on it, and all your files are right there!This would be useful in an environment where people move around a lot sharing computers, but don't actually want to totally trust the previous users to not have downloaded some malware, e.g. people who frequent internet cafes.Another point is that we make the mistake of thinking of this technology in relation to our current technology, the biggest value of a new technology is in something you haven't thought of.

The latest Ubuntu (12.10) can be used as a live CD on a 1GB flash drive.Now, if you were to use a 64GB flash drive, you can have a full OS, plus some music/movies/games in your pocket.Sure, you might not be able to put your entire collection on the device, but it can be pretty damn close.

A problem with flash drives though is that they can be easily lost, so having everything on it as your primary hard-drive is probably quite a bad idea.

LOL, as another AEC industry employee, I will tell you one common file that exceeds 128GB. Laser Scans. I have a number of laser scans that are in excess of 200GB. However, that still falls under the "almost no single files are larger than..." clause of the OP. But, there are files that are larger than a 128Gb flash drive - just not very many...

And I'll add that I'm unlikely to ever spend more than $100 on a flash drive ever again. I spent $130 on a 512 MB (yes M not G) CF card for my camera back in 2004. It now sits unused in my bag since it'll only hold about 40 shots in RAW mode. I'd throw it away except it'd feel like I'm throwing away over $100.

I'll stick with an external USB 3.0 drive. Sure, it won't fit on my keyring or have read speeds of 240MB/s (theoretical), but they make them small enough to fit in my pocket and they are more then fast enough (my external USB drive at work sustains 60-80 MB/s on large transfers 700 MB+).

Plus, when people say "Is that a 1TB drive in your pants or are you just happy to see me?", I would rather have a large, girthy hard drive in my pocket rather than a tiny, inadequete little flash key. Just sayin :P